I am an Australian web developer currently working in Tokyo, I will be returning home at the end of the year and need to set up a home office on the Gold Coast.
I have been in Japan for 8 years and am out of touch with Australian ISP trends. I was hoping some fellow sitepoint users could recommend some of the reliable affordable services they use or even warn me off others.
Coming from Japan I not used to download limits or ADSL connections. I can see my wife watching a lot of Japanese TV over the Internet so I will need a large download limit.
Bad news… internet speeds are pretty lousy down here, generally relying on old, worn out copper wires. (It’s a massive political hot potato right now… the recent election of the feral [sic] government in large measure swung on this issue.) ADSL2 is not bad if you live close to an exchange. I use Primus and find them very good, but I doubt there’s much difference between the heavyweights. A smaller competitor that gets a lot of promotion is TPG, but I’ve been hearing bad things lately about poor connections (from businesses that rely on the web). Could be isolated cases, though. There are lots of “compare ISP” sites/forums down here. A bit of Gurgling/Bonging wouldn’t hurt.
